Make member area usable

Many large sites use member registration to give their members extended features. But a hell of a lot of them are not very usable. In the nice (Dutch) usability book Website Usability, written by Ward van der Put, I found five guidelines for login-screens and member area:

Use for login-screens only user name and password combinations.
Don’t use an e-mail address as user name, since people might think they’re gonna get spam.
When personal details like addresses are being viewed, use a secure HTTP connection, SSL for instance. If you don’t, these details can be viewed by third parties like hackers.
Give users the possibility to change their passwords. If strong security is needed, auto change the passwords when users don’t do it by themselves.
Give logged in members the opportunity to log out. Technically it’s not needed, but it gives members a secure feeling.

Posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 in Accessibility, Usability
Comments and trackbacks are welcome.

8 responses to Make member area usable

I don’t agree with the guideline that you should not use e-mail addresses as a user name.
Personally, I prefer to let users log on to secured areas with their e-mail address and a password in stead of username/password. This makes it easier to state that an e-mailadres is the same as a unique user and I think it is more user-friendly as the user has less information to fill in and remember.
Websites always should have a clear privacy policy and the e-mail address should be shown to other users opt-in only. When it is necesary to identify users, e.g. in a discussion board, users are able to choose a nickname in their profile after they logged on.
Sint said on April 5th, 2007.
Okey, but an e-mailaddress can change, for example when you change to another ISP. Also, new members could think they get spammed after their registration. That’s why I totally agree with you about a clear privacy policy (like mine at the bottom of my comment form).
Arjan Eising said on April 5th, 2007.
An option to change the e-mailadress could solve this.

I think an e-mail address is the least you can ask from a member. You always need something to communicate to your users.

And if they’re afraid of receiving spam, they’d better not even go online at all and spend the time saved ducktaping their letter box instead.
Sint said on April 6th, 2007.
An e-mailaddress always needs to be editable, same as other personal information.
But I think the real answer is in the middle: for every member area it could be with or without an e-mailaddress as username. As long as you think about both options…
Arjan Eising said on April 6th, 2007.
Indeed, that sounds quite right.

If you look at major players in the market, both Microsoft en Google use e-mail addresses to authorise their users too. So your members should be used to share their e-mail address to receive access to a service.

For most people I know who are using either Google or MSN/Live services, if their e-mail address changes, they volunteerly re-register, since neither of them offers an option to change the e-mail address as far as I know. Probably the authority of these services makes it acceptable to not-offer a functionality like change e-mail address :-)
Sint said on April 11th, 2007.
Yes, but we are not Google and Microsoft ;) But at least, do well think about the usage of e-mail addresses.
Arjan Eising said on April 12th, 2007.

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Make member area usable

8 responses to Make member area usable

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